American life through the eyes of a color photography pioneer

There was a time when color photography wasn’t taken seriously. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered amateurish, good for holiday snaps and advertisements at best. It had no place in the art world, where black-and-white prevailed.

The work of a few rebels was instrumental in changing this attitude. Chief among them Joel Meyerowitz, one of the earliest and most successful advocates of color. The New York photographer, who’ll turn 80 this year, started his pioneering work with color film in 1962, mostly by accident.

“When I began, in all my innocence, the first roll of film I ever put in a camera was a color film, because it seemed to me the world was in color and you’d take pictures of the world as it looked,” he said in a phone interview.

“I didn’t understand at that point that black-and-white was considered high art and color was considered amateurish, commercial and journalistic. There was a real built-in prejudice and my generation had to fight that fight.”

Double shot

Puerto Rico Day Parade, New York City (1963) —

Joel Meyerowitz, a pioneer of color photography. Reminiscing about this shot from in the early '60s, he said: "The four girls stood in a doorway primping and getting ready to walk in the parade. Seen against the dreary buildings, they were like tropical flowers bursting into color."

Paris, France (1967) —

Meyerowitz favored his home turf of Fifth Avenue, New York, but one of his best shots was taken in Paris. "Which is the greater drama of life in the city: the fictitious clash between two figures that is implied (by the young man on the ground and the workman stepping over him), or the indifference of the one to the other that is actual? A photograph allows such contradictions to exist in everyday life; more than that, it encourages them," he said.

Dairy Land, Provincetown, Massachusetts (1976) —

"I was on my way back from the supermarket when I passed Dairy Land," Meyerowitz said. Out of the corner of my eye, the neon glow called out to me, so I swerved right in. Stepping out of the car was like stepping into a cotton-candy pink haze. The light radiating through and off the clouds at that hour suffused everything with a rosy glow against which the yellow neon hummed a crazy harmony."

New York City (1963) —

"What interested me about photographing the parades in New York was seeing the way people who were not necessarily relating to each other were now thrown together simply because I put a frame around them. Suddenly they had a new context that only I could see, and the absurdity of what that sometimes produced I found fascinating."

New York City (1978) —

"I was working on a project where the Empire State Building was my Mount Fuji, and I circled around it looking for interesting moments that came from ordinary life being lived under within range of the mountain. On this corner I saw a young ballet dancer waiting for a friend, and there behind her was a window full of color: bananas, neon light, the gorgeous orange of the storefront, that crazy sunburst above and, in the background, the majestic Empire State Building."

The Bronx, New York City (1967) —

"Walking through the gardens one summer Saturday, I saw a bride posing for her wedding album. But, at the same time, I saw what the wedding photographer would cut out of his frame: the man sitting on his lounge chair. I knew right then that the photograph was about that."

Sarah, Princetown, Massachusetts (1980) —

"I was fascinated by the unexpected beauty that I found myself attracted to, like this young woman, whose freckled skin and curly red hair seemed to me to make her as exotic as a rare tropical fish."

"Inside the Pile Looking West" (2001) —

"I spent nine months photographing inside ground zero. Even though this was a place where a great tragedy occurred, there were moments when nature, in the form of light or weather, produced startlingly beautiful effects. It was my responsibility as the artist-historian to respond to beauty even when it appeared over what might seem to be a place reserved for the tragic."

"W. 46 St., New York City" (1976) —

"There's a French expression, the 'flaneur' -- somebody who would go out walking on the boulevards of Paris, for example, just observing life and commenting on it in whatever way they chose. I'm someone who loves to go out on the boulevards of the world. Fifth Avenue in New York City was my street for my whole working life and there you see it all, the high and the low."

The man who put the color in photography

Prev Next

In 1966, Meyerowitz drove across Europe armed with two cameras: one with color film, one with black-and-white. During the trip, he took 25,000 photographs over 700 rolls of film, half of which were in color. Whenever there was an opportunity, he would make pairs of pictures in both formats to compare them.

“When I got back, I had a black-and-white show at MoMA (New York’s Museum of Modern Art), but as I was editing the color films from that trip, my conviction was getting stronger. Within the next couple of years I turned to color almost completely, and by 1971 I was finished with black-and-white,” he said.

Boulevards of the world

While pushing for color, Meyerowitz made his name as a street photographer by capturing the vibrant, colorful drama of everyday life in New York City.

“The mix of life on the street offers untold opportunities to observe human nature and one’s personal response to it. By doing that, you begin to see what it is about the world that is so appealing or attractive to you as an individual. A street photographer makes the most of what he’s been given, any time he goes out in the street,” he said.

A shot from a Parisian street from 1967.

A selection of Meyerowitz’s influential work – both in color and in black-and-white – is now on show in a retrospective titled “Why Color?” at Berlin’s C/O Foundation. This exhibition, he said, will encourage visitors to consider how much attitudes toward color photography has changed.

“When you have a life that spans 55 years of photography, you get to see the history of recent photography itself. The question of color is one of the big ones.”

“Joel Meyerowitz: Why Color?” is on show at C/O Berlin Foundation until Mar. 11, 2018.